ICTR Sentences Kalimanzira for 30 Years

A former Rwandan official was sentenced to 30 years in jail for his role in the death of “thousands of Tutsi refugees” in country’s 1994 genocide, a court announced Monday.

Callixte Kalimanzira, a top Interior Ministry official at the time, “lured” the refugees to Kabuye hill and helped “provide armed reinforcements” to attack and kill them, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda said in a statement.

The court found Kalimanzira “guilty of genocide and direct and public incitement to commit genocide,” it announced. “By encouraging Tutsi refugees to gather at Kabuye hill where he knew they would be killed in the thousands, he abused the public’s trust that he, like other officials, would protect them,” the court said.

It also found him guilty of encouraging genocide on four other occasions in April and May 1994. The time he has spent in jail since handing himself over to the court in November 2005 will be deducted from his 30-year sentence.

Following the 1994 assassination of then-Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana, extremist militias made up of ethnic Hutus slaughtered ethnic Tutsis across Rwanda, beginning in April. Within 100 days, an estimated 800,000 people were killed.